02001-06-14 | Uncategorized
On the band bus somewhere in Arizona, driving toward Ojai…
We did pretty well for our first show in Boulder last night. Kanoa’s synth detuned itself somehow and the beginning of Lush turned into a bit of a cacophony. I forgot the coda after Ode 2 Love completely. And the end of the encore doesn’t sound right to me yet and we will have to play around with finding a better rhythm for it. But overall I am very happy with the sound of the band. The two days of rehearsals in Boulder were very enjoyable, but the weather changed radically for the show day and the temperature dropped from about 93 degrees to around 45 degrees. Since the Chautauqua hall is a barn it was FREEZING inside. It warmed up a little bit with the capacity audience inside, but fingers just didn’t want to move as fast as we would have liked them to!
02001-06-11 | Uncategorized
We drove in three rental cars from Santa Fe to Boulder yesterday. I rode in a car with Calvin and Jon, and we asked Calvin to tell us stories about the Flamenco world in Madrid, Spain. Calvin plays Flamenco guitar in a club in Madrid, where he accompanies Flamenco dancers and singers.
Today our crew will set up the stage at the Chautauqua and we hope to get to run the show once this afternoon. My right thumb, which I stabbed with a speaker spike last week – it left a nice clean hole that was a quarter inch in diameter and a quarter inch deep – is almost healed up. It’s become a tradition for me to hurt myself within the last week before the tour. I think this is the fourth time. Do I really not want to go on the road? Is the self-imposed pressure of putting on a great show to much? I don’t know.
Went to a coffee shop across from the hotel this morning to have an eye-opener (regular coffee with a shot of espresso) and noticed that there is no mention of our show on Wednesday in the Boulder Weekly, just an add for all of the shows at the Chautauqua.
02001-06-06 | Uncategorized
Hotels would start charging guests for water usage. Meter the water usage of every room – which will reward people using less water.
Possibly do the same with electricity.
Install credit card readers in the rooms which activate the flow of electricity and or water.
02001-06-05 | Internet, Musings, World
News from Cambodia (AP) –
Within eyesight of a sign urging ‘Don’t sell wildlife,’ a roadside vendor is peddling four slow lorises – little primates with sad luminous eyes — to be burned alive and churned into purported Chinese medicine. A mortal danger to gibbons and other primates in Indochina is the area’s proximity to China, where the appetite for exotic meat, medicine and aphrodisiacs seems insatiable, and growing as the country’s economic prosperity increases. Thousands of primates which once chattered and sang in Indochina’s jungles are reduced to powdered bones, dried feet, blood and wine concoctions and monkey brains on Chinese plates.
Some days it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the news of mankind’s cruelty and shortsightedness. From the distruction of ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan to the eating of rare primates. On those days it feels good to take the long view. Check out the Long Now. Started years ago by a group of people who felt that we don’t look far enough ahead, this organization has created the millenium clock. This clock ticks once a year, bongs once every hundred years and the cuckoo comes out every 1,000 years. The protoype has been ticking at the Science Museum in London since 1999. Recently the group has aquired 180 acres of land in Nevada where they plan to set up the millenium clock among Bristlecone Pines that are up to 5,000 years old. Bristlecone Pinetrees are the oldest living things on this planet and some in Utah are up to 7,000 years old.
These days when nobody is willing to spend 600 years on the building of a public building (the Cathedral of Cologne was built from 1200 until 1800), we have lost the long view, but maybe the millenium clock can put us in touch with it again……
From the text on Long Now:
“I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?”
02001-06-04 | Uncategorized
The name of the Bansuri flute player I couldn’t remember the other day is: Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia.
Water. The next shortage after oil and energy…..
From the UK Telegraph Newspaper…..
Mr Gates will not be allowed to extend the man-made salmon stream at his home. So-called mega-houses have put a strain on Seattle’s infrastructure. Mr Gates used 4.7 million gallons of water last year. The average household uses 80,000 gallons.
